Imag ne (Sculpture By The Sea 1)

I Imagine.
I Imagine life without joggers...(it would be easier to walk in Sydney's beautiful places!)

Then I imagine the Unimaginable:
Sydney without Sculpture By The Sea in October/November...
Sydney without the sandstone cliffs and blue seas of its beautiful coastline...

Most weekday mornings I roll out of bed at about 5.15, telling myself it's "good for me" in order to walk or swim. This morning, a grey day, I was on the road before dawn headed for the coast walk between Bondi and Tamarama beaches, to join the rushing stream of joggers and walkers, and view the annual Sculpture By The Sea exhibition.

Over the next however-long-it-takes I'll bring you photos from along the walk.

Sculpture By The Sea has now been exported from Sydney to Perth and Aarhus in Denmark (the latter under the sponsorship of Australian-born Princess Mary of Denmark).

This work, Imag ne is by Emma Anna, who says: "I imagine people sitting out here on the rocks in the afternoon, looking through the gap in the work to the horizon beyond....This part of Sydney is such a beautiful space - you can place a very contemplative sort of sculpture here and it just fits." (Sydney Morning Herald October 16, 2008)

Where do your imaginings take you?

Pretty front garden

A lovely front garden with neatly trimmed buffalo grass, and flowering borders. So many places nowadays have hard surfaces - paving and concrete - that the traditional front garden is rapidly disappearing. That is happening at the same time as housing densities are increasing, so townhouses, multiple occupancy developments are replacing single suburban lots. There's more demand for off-street parking (see the house next door in the background) as the volume of cars increases that soft surfaces are replaced by concrete aprons to park cars, even in single dwellings.

Anyway, here's an exuberant celebration of the freestanding house with a well-kept front yard.

Fat Mirror

Part of a playground, Firmstone Gardens, Arncliffe

Balcony Bars

The weekend is upon us again, the weather is forecast to be sparkling, and a balcony bar could be just the place to be!

Dinosaur

Imagine my surprise when I looked up and confronted this fellow from the entranceway of the Australian Museum, College St, Sydney. It is Australia's oldest museum, founded in 1827 and specialises in natural history and anthropology. The beautiful sandstone building it is now in was opened in May 1857. Website.

Trade Wall

Inside the Museum of Sydney is this wall displaying goods available in Sydney shops and streets of the 1830s, as advertised in daily newspapers.

The Headmaster's Office

I was walking past Sydney Grammar School one night after dark, and saw into this office, which may be the Principal's office (and that's a plant outside displaying its fronds). It brought back a memory of a time I was in the principal's office at high school. I think I entered the principal's office once in my six years there, and can remember being terrified. It was something fairly innocuous - an interview about future "career plans" I think, but you were made to stand, trembling, in front of her, and account for yourself. That school liked to pretend that most of its female-only students were "destined for the professions", which in the early 1970s, for most girls, meant nursing and teaching. The occasional few entered the more hallowed disciplines of the law and medicine.

It was limiting. Thank goodness girls have more options nowadays.

Did you ever find yourself in the principal's office, and what was it for?

Embankment

Springtime display in morning shadows.

Free Hugs

Juan Mann started the "Free Hugs" movement which has now been adopted in several places around the world. Here he is "off duty".

Here's a wikipedia article on the Free Hugs movement, and here's Juan's own site (JuanMann.tv)

Have you ever been moved to hug a stranger?

Still Life with Stone and Car

This afternoon I went to a performance of a remarkable Sydney Theatre Company production of The Women of Troy at the Wharf Theatre. Just down Hickson Rd, at the corner of Pottinger St is this sculpture by Jimmie Durham, called Still Life With Stone and Car.

It was created at the forecourt of the Opera House for the 2004 Sydney Biennale, when he dropped the stone onto the car using a crane, and then it was moved to this roundabout in Walsh Bay for an outdoor sculpture display.

The artist, Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee from Arkansas, said of this work:

"Like most of my recent work, this piece is concerned with monuments and monumentality, but also with 'nature'; that implacable hard stuff. In the first instance I am using the stone as a tool; to change the shape of an object. But I also, as usual, want to make stone more light, more moveable, even if it is in a fairly horrible way - like a road accident.. I do not think the piece is humorous; even though it turns out to be. The kind of face painted on the real version will, of course, depend upon the shape of the stone, but it will in any case be placid, and neither 'realistic' nor cartoon-like. To my way of thinking if the stone is simply a stone without a face it becomes a gesture but with the face painted on it, the work develops a strange narrative. "

Read more about the artist and the creation of the piece here.

What do you think of the setting? I think placing it in the centre of a roundabout along a fairly busy, but not too busy, route in an Arts precinct is terrific. It is very accessible and highly visible.

PS - 28 Oct: I have been told that there is a sign nearby (which I missed) telling people that this is an art work, not an actual accident!